Met Office issues weather warning as UK conditions create ‘perfect recipe’ for fog

The Met Office has said weather conditions in the UK are creating a “perfect recipe” for fog as it warned that travel may be disrupted.

A yellow weather warning lasting from 6pm on Sunday until 11am on Monday has been issued by the service, with the affected areas including most of southern England, excluding the south-west, and the entirety of the Midlands.

The warning also includes pockets of northern England and Wales, with fog expected in Liverpool, Sheffield, York, Cardiff and Wrexham.

Niamh Murray, a Met Office operational meteorologist, said: “There is still going to be patchy fog elsewhere, just not quite as dense or as impactful. Parts of the West Country could still see fog, Northern Ireland, really anywhere across much of the UK, even into the central belt of Scotland.

“With autumn and winter and getting fog during this time of year, we get much longer nights, and that allows temperatures to sort of fall away,” she told the Press Association. “We get a longer period of cooling and also the temperatures are much lower, so they’re much closer to the temperature that we need for the air to become saturated and therefore form fog.”

Murray believes recent weather conditions have created the “perfect recipe” for dense fog to roll across large areas of England and Wales.

“Another thing that we need to form fog is quite light winds, not absolutely no winds,” she said. “We just have the perfect recipe at the moment: light winds, clear skies, long nights, to allow that fog to develop. And particularly if we see the negative numbers, it can be quite stubborn to clear the next day.”

The Met Office said the fog may be densest overnight on Monday in rural areas such as parts of the Midlands, Wales and East Anglia, with air frost possible.

It also warned that delays to bus and train services could happen as visibility may reduce to as little as 50 metres or less in parts of the UK. Delays and cancellations for flights in and out of the country are also a possibility due to the heaviness of the fog.

Murray claimed rainfall that follows the fog could benefit areas of the UK such as the south-west, which have suffered droughts in the preceding months.

She added: “Across the south-west, where severe drought has been declared and is still enforced by the Environment Agency, there is a chance that we might see some very slow-moving rain, and you could see potentially accumulations up to 50 to 70mm.”